The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is one of the great treasures of Washington’s arts scene, a federal museum with the guts to undertake strange and current exhibitions, along with adventurous musical programs to accompany them. So it should be no surprise that DCist was at the Hirshhorn yesterday to hear what was sure to be an excellent and interesting concert by the Norwegian pianist Håkon Austbø. With a name spelled like that, how could this event not be fun? Throw in the fact that the program was devoted to music by Alexander Scriabin and Olivier Messiaen, two composers influenced by the phenomenon of synesthesia, or color hearing, and that sealed the deal.

This concert was the final event connected to an interesting summer exhibit at the Hirshhorn, Visual Music, which closed on Sunday. In July, we reviewed a concert by the 21st Century Consort on the same theme, which was arranged near the opening of the exhibit. The art in the show is about translating music into color, and the two concerts featured composers interested in how to render color as music. Håkon Austbø has just moved back to his native Oslo from Amsterdam, where he led the LUCE Foundation, a group interested in recreating the color/music performances of Alexander Scriabin. He and his colleagues spent several years figuring out how to perform Scriabin’s Prométhée, le Poème du Feu, an enigmatic symphony, on the Prometheus legend, with a notated part (Luce) for projected colors.